The invention relates to a method for the autostereoscopic representation of images on a screen, wherein image information of separate channels for a right eye and a left eye of a user is displayed in interleaved segments on the screen, and a lens array is disposed for deflecting light emitted from the screen such that the image information of each channel is visible only for one eye of the user.
According to the general principles of stereoscopy, an impression of spatial depth is generated by presenting to the two eyes of a viewer two different images that show the same scene from slightly different perspectives which reflect in the parallax difference between the left and right eye of the viewer.
Conventional systems for presenting different images to the left and right eyes of the user employ headsets or shutter glasses which, however, are quite disturbing for the user.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,302,541 A1 describes a method of the type indicated above, which permits to view autostereoscopic images “with the naked eye”, so that stereoscopic images can for example be produced on a screen of a computer monitor or the like. To that end, the image information of the left and right channels, i.e. the information intended for the left and right eye, respectively, of the user, is displayed on the screen in the form of segments, i.e. vertical stripes, which alternatingly belong to the left and to the right channel, and a lens array formed for example by cylindrical lenses is arranged in front of the screen and is carefully positioned relative to the pixel raster of the screen, so that the light emitted from the various screen pixels is deflected such that, for a specific position of the viewer, the information of each channel is visible only for one eye. A head tracking or eye tracking system may be employed for adapting the image representation on the screen to changing positions of the viewer.
This method has the further remarkable feature that each segment includes, in addition to image information that is assigned to that segment, also image information that is assigned to at least one adjacent segment of the same channel. It is therefore quite robust against minor variations in the position of the user, if no head or eye tracking system is used, and is also robust against delays in the head tracking system. This robustness is achieved by a redundancy in the information displayed in each segment, so that, when the viewing position is changed and, as a result, other pixels become visible for each eye of the user, the information displayed in the pixels that have become visible still fits into the image for the pertinent channel.